Begin at the beginning (approximately), with this poem, “The Flight,” number 3 in Autumn Songs (1978). Why single it out? Why does it interest me?

I’m interested by the precision of description here, yes – the way in which Stephen Oliver captures that scene of birds swooping on trees at a certain hour of twilight (“before the stars”). I’m also interested by his lack of concession to the human dimension:

& so the fabric loosens
& the mesh of the centre is diffuse

(allows mist through).

His characters are air, light, smoke – “the airy carpentry of autumn” / “unexpected partitions of light” / “foreign smoke before the flat accents of the city.” If John Pule hadn’t mentioned (in JAAM 13 (2000): 58) that Oliver’s first book & Interviews (also 1978) was “a profoundly moving account of his life & marriage in Dunedin” I fear I might not have noticed. There’s much complex evocation of time and place, but little of their personnel. On the first page of these Selected Poems he writes:

we enjoy the echo
of the child who tracks the ground between each
/

his voice building a ripple from your wall to mine.

Not complaining, mind you. Just trying to define what it is I’m reading. Oliver is not an easy writer. His work repays attention, but it can seem quite opaque to casual raids and dipping-into’s (my usual strategy with a new book of poems). This one demands to be read right through, in order, and much of it will escape you unless you do just that.

Back to that poem “The Flight,” though.

Over the rise and fall of the tree/line

such Black Concentrations!

There it is again: “Black Concentrations!” Two capital letters and an exclamation mark. It’s an interesting phrase. I suppose I think of concentration camps, a little; of the Russian Black Hundreds, those instigators of innumerable pogroms … Above all, though, what’s clear is the poet’s delight in the phrase itself, the words themselves:

Words and the shadows they cast, words and their weight, words round and pyramidal, words combustible and the wordscapes we constructed in our talk and across the wastes of the untracked page. …(43)

muses Oliver in his autobiographical essay “Chalk, Talk and Asphalt Days” (JAAM 15 (2001): 26-45). He goes on to say:

The first engagement in one’s writing apprenticeship is usually with the flare and brilliance of image; hopefully, and in the intervening years, the intellect and one’s ability to abstract and represent ideas constructs a superstructure out of the ‘small felicities’ beyond metaphor. (44)

This passage offers several useful clues about how to approach his poetic project: “the intellect,” “abstract,” “represent ideas” warn us not to expect any simple sensuous celebrations of the ordinary here! It comes as no surprise when Oliver tells us “the drawcard of Yeats I have avoided to this very day, probably warned off by Larkin” (40) – “for me always, Auden.”

Back to Black Concentrations, though. There’s a poem of that title in Oliver’s second book Earthbound Mirrors (1984) – “my favourite,” says John Pule.

I consider the magic or aggression
gone out of it – entirely. Lives, that is.

A distinct peace.

The immediate slowed to peace/ sans / colour.

Stillness plump as a cushion not sat upon.

I can’t help seeing this as an immense advance on the earlier book. The complex explorations of Auckland in “Something in the Air:” “Auckland you big arsehole, / ah , soul is what the man meant, what you lack” are the beginnings of articulation of a personal mythology – a series of statements designed to become more powerful, more mystical than sense:

When the city has become one fluorescent tube
the Black Concentrations blockade the Gulf.

I take it “Black Concentrations” were birds at their first appearance, in “The Flight,” birds meant to remind us of something else – one of those “‘small felicities’ beyond metaphor.” Now they have become a personification of the “armies of unalterable law” (George Meredith’s Victorian formulation of the same concept – or Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex; here, American nuclear ships). And then again, in “Flotilla”:

as you sink into the green depths of Victoria Park
where it could be under you the surface recedes

back from the tree tops to the Black Concentrations
of stars.

The incantatory is a difficult mode to master. The obvious skill displayed by Oliver’s first book might have tempted some poets to rest on their laurels, to stay in that (early) Loney-esque mode of direction-through-indirection. Earthbound Mirrors is where the story really begins to get interesting, for me. I find this repeated use of a phrase, in different contexts, with different local significances, with no particular reference to the fact one’s doing it, an original and daring strategy. No clear precedents spring to mind, in fact. Eliot? Hölderlin?

I also like the tone of relaxed indifference that characterises a poem like “Black Concentrations”:

So much habitation and no one to hear me observe
and no one to inform me they do not hear me say

Oliver seems the reverse of concerned about his silence in the face of “so much habitation.” Is he, then, a natural exile, as opposed to those (like Paul Celan) created by circumstances?

Of course one is aware that his move to Australia has brought him recognition beyond that which might have been accorded in New Zealand’s somewhat monochrome literary scene, but it’s hard to say if this was a necessary displacement. I can’t help feeling that it’s neither here nor there for Oliver, that his country is the inside of his head, and that reading and rereading this book (and his various others) is the only passport required.

It’s a fascinating project – not the only thing for a poet to choose to do, mind you: a thing so unusual, in fact, that it’s hard to think of precedents in New Zealand poetry. Allen Curnow, I suppose, to some extent, with his mania for metaphysics; David Howard’s Heideggerian love poems ... but both of them are cling more closely to the “simple, sensuous and passionate” than Stephen Oliver.

This book charts twenty years of intellectual (and literal) journeying. I doubt the story’s half-over yet, though. I’m looking forward to the next instalment.

STEPHEN OLIVERNight of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000.
From the review by Jack Ross

The obvious skill displayed by Oliver's first book might have tempted some poets to rest on their laurels, to stay in that (early) Loney-esque mode of direction-through-indirection. Earthbound Mirrors is where the story really begins to get interesting, for me. I find this repeated use of a phrase, in different contexts, with different local significances, with no particular reference to the fact one's doing it, an original and daring strategy. No clear precedents spring to mind, in fact. Eliot? Hölderlin? I also like the tone of relaxed indifference that characterises a poem like “Black Concentrations”:

So much habitation and no one to hear me observe
and no one to inform me they do not hear me say

Oliver seems the reverse of concerned about his silence in the face of “so much habitation.” Is he, then, a natural exile, as opposed to those (like Paul Celan) created by circumstances?

Of course one is aware that his move to Australia has brought him recognition beyond that which might have been accorded in New Zealand's somewhat monochrome literary scene, but it's hard to say if this was a necessary displacement. I can't help feeling that it's neither here nor there for Oliver, that his country is the inside of his head, and that reading and rereading this book (and his various others) is the only passport required.

It's a fascinating project -- not the only thing for a poet to choose to do, mind you: a thing so unusual, in fact, that it's hard to think of precedents in New Zealand poetry. Allen Curnow, I suppose, to some extent, with his mania for metaphysics; David Howard's Heideggerian love poems ... but both of them are cling more closely to the “simple, sensuous and passionate” than Stephen Oliver.

This book charts twenty years of intellectual (and literal) journeying. I doubt the story's half-over yet, though. I'm looking forward to the next instalment.

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About Me

I've published several collections of poems, including City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal's Book (2002), To Terezin (2007), Celanie (2012) and A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014), as well as three novels, a novella and two books of short fiction. I've also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (from 2014) Poetry NZ. I have a PhD in English from Edinburgh University, and work as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany campus (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3988-3926).